The real dune deal

“You wish to return to Arrakeen, to the place of his water?” “To…yes, to the place of his water.” “Why did you not say at first it was a water matter?”

-Dune

It’s as if Frank Herbert himself had ridden with us on the Darb. It happened after we’d passed the Sudanese border at Argeen low on water and drank from Kalabsha’s sulphurous wells. No spice to fight over, no sandworms to ride, no Paul Muad’Dib- an Arabic word, Mu’addib, meaning A Teacher of Cultivated Manners, or Mu’addab, according to Lane, A Well-Trained Camel- leading his army, just aseeda salt and tea sugar, jamals and naagas, KhairAllah as our trail boss, and very foul water.

Herbert coined more than one hundred words of Dune’s language from Arabic etymologies. The drovers would have felt right at home up there on the waterless planet Arrakis, near the star Al-Raqis, meaning The Dancer, a name that Arab poets gave to a particularly fine trotting camel, and called now by astronomers Mu Draconis A.

Heads and hands in the night sky

Far and few, and far and few,/Are the lands where the Jumblies live;/Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,/…

-The Jumblies, Edward Lear

For a man to qualify today as a Jumblie he need not practice anthrophagy…It is comforting to imagine that when that day arrives we might be in a position to have the inhabitants of a nearby planet as our Jumblies.

-Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue, from the Foreward, Paul Bowles

Lear sailed up the Nile to the second cataract in 1867- ”Nubia delighted me,” he wrote, “it isn’t a bit like Egypt except there is a river in both”- where he might have seen green Sufi turbans worn on heads and blue Hands of Fatima painted on doors. Bowles would have happily found a Jumblie- silencing the B, he would become Jamali, Camel-like- on one of his trips into the Rif, a region he considered as Tangier’s Outer Space, but he hoped for better luck finding them on planets circling stars like Beta Draconis A, or Rastaban, Ra’s al-Thu’ban, Head of the Snake, and Alpha Orionis, or Betelgeuse, Yad al-Jawzaa’, Hand of the Middle.

Daraw without daboukas

A little above Kom Omboo and on the same side of the river is Dera’weh [Daraw], the principal abode of the Ababdeh Arabs who have settled near the river. It is also the place whence caravans of Shendeh and Sennar [both in Sudan] generally start, striking off from this point into the desert: and hither the Ababdeh frequently bring for sale camels, sheep, senna, and charcoal.

-Description of Egypt, Edward Lane, written in 1829, first published in 2020

Daraw is across the river from Binban where the daboukas when I rode with them first entered Egypt’s Nile Valley. Until arriving in Daraw, for forty days we had been on the outside, looking in. The town had a livestock quarantine station where the camels stayed overnight before being shipped by rail to Cairo’s butchers. All that has changed since the asphalt road was built to Argueen on the Sudanese border, from where they are trucked straight north. Now Daraw is quiet, the trade in senna having long passed too.

Kabeer or khabeer?

Ana Kabeer wa Inta Kabeer, Meen Yasooq al-Jamal?…Me a Big Shot and You a Big Shot, Who will Drive the Camel?

-A Collection of Modern Egyptian Proverbs, Joseph Hanki, 1897, Cairo

Kabeer, Big Shot, and Khabeer, Expert, or, in this context, Trail Boss, both have broken plurals, Kubaar and Khubaraa’, but I have never seen a broken Khabeer. The Khubaraa’ I knew were all self-possessed men who had earned their way to the front of the dabouka, in the so-called Maddagha seat (meaning, the cud-chewing part of a camel’s mouth, from the quadriliteral verb Daghdagha, to Munch), taking their place on the right because a moving herd drifts in that direction, thus putting the Maddagha in position to steer simply by widening or tightening the gap between the lead camels and him. So to answer the proverb’s question, the Maddagha will.

Makhrooqa means what exactly?

Adam Hamid rides Makhrooqa, Left Point, on the tallest camel…

-Trail Diary, January-February 1984

Makhrooq. One who is denied prosperity, into whose hand wealth falls not. Mukhrawriq, One who goes round about camels, meaning who has them within the compass of his care, and urges them on against their will, and is active and exercises art in their management.

- Lane’s Lexicon, entries under the root Kh-R-Q

Makhraqa. Sleight of hand, swindle, hocus-pocus, trickery.

-Wehr’s Dictionary, entry under the root Kh-R-Q

I still cannot know for sure the underlying meaning of the word that I heard the drovers pronounce as Makhrooqa, or perhaps Makhrooga, which I transliterated with a Q, getting no help in its Arabic spelling from them because they were all illiterate. A Sudanese friend told me that in Sudanese dialect, Makhrooqa means Human Thigh, which gives a very different word, Fakhdh, in Classical Arabic. So I will go with Lane’s active participle with the interpolated second R, Mukhrawriq, One who urges camels against their will, a meaning that holds for all drovers regardless of where in the herd they ride.

Pouring Tea

Many laughs for the tea drinking scene when the first glass is poured from a chrome thermos bottle and the second from a blackened pot.

-Sudan Film Tour Diary, January 2010, for the screening at the University of Kordofan, El Obeid, before an audience of students, professors, and the Nazir of the Kawahla

The cure lies in the poison, so now pour.

-Abu Nuwas, 8th C Poet of Khamriyya, Wine drinking verse, and an Egyptian brand of black tea

I remember how the drovers drank tea. The holes in the pot’s bottom were replugged with aseeda crumbs they hoped would hold until it boiled. They filled glasses with hot water and emptied back into the pot to warm before drinking. They debated Zeno’s paradox for how much sugar they should use- half of whatever remained in the bag, thus being certain never to run out, or always the same set amount, come what outage may. Then much slurping and smacking of lips and giving of thanks that the aseeda crumbs had held. And no laughing, at least not at first.

Big men eat camel too

La viande de chameau, ou de buffle tout au plus, lui est abandonné par les grands.

-Description de l’Égypte, 1826, Tome XVIII, État Moderne

Napoleon may have preferred canard à l’orange or faisan flambé, but on the trail beggars can’t be choosers. You’ll like the taste of whatever meat falls into your hands, and when a lame camel must be mercy killed, you butcher and eat as fast as you can. In Cairo, even les Grands, the Big Shots, the Kubaar get hungry for meat, and when there is none but camel to be had, they can thank the Khubaraa’, the Trail Bosses, for bringing it up from Kordofan live on the hoof.

Bon appétit in Um al-dunya

It is very affecting to see at the approach of the caravan the numerous parties who go out with drums and pipes to welcome and escort to the city their friends…for the arduous journey through the desert is fatal to a great number of those who cannot afford themselves the necessary conveniences.

-Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Edward Lane

On the outskirts of Binban we were not met with pipes and drums and friends greeting friends but rather the worst of Egyptian haggling- buyers swarming the herd on donkeys, swirling shouts and dust in the air, gutteral bellows of, That one is mine! and, Save the red camel for me! and, Hands off the one I want! Hajj Bashir’s agent Ahmad abd al-Majid introduced himself as Sahib al-Tibin, the Straw Boss, for that is what he fed our camels once they were settled at the ferry crossing. To us he served fresh tomato and cucumber and gargeer leaves. Marhaban fi Um al-Dunya, he said, Welcome to the Mother of the World, which was just as it tasted after forty days of millet paste.

Camel buyers, Binban, Egypt © David Melody

An evanescent excrescence

…an ass, an agreeable substitute to the pilgrim for his jaded and uneasy camel…(1)

(1) This explanation of the use of an excrescence which would otherwise seem a mere inconvenient encumbrance shows how wonderfully the camel is adapted to the peculiar circumstances in which Providence has placed it…

-Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Edward Lane, in a footnote explaining the natural history of the camel’s hump

On the trail if one of the herd must be butchered you eat his excrescence, cooked on coals and buried in a sand pit Hawaiian style. Yes, maybe the hump is inconvenient for you perched on top, but less an encumbrance for your camel given what more- your disagreeable ass, forty 16mm film cannisters, hunks of petrified wood you’ve collected along the way- encumbers him. No wonder he arrives in Egypt jaded and uneasy, not the least because next he’s marched straight to the slaughterhouse where it is tossed aside by Egyptians with no taste for hump fat and gristle.

Speaking, and speaking and speaking, of camels...

Whoever reads this book will find out a very great deal about camels; of that I am sure.

-The Camel and the Wheel, Richard Bulliet, from Apologia

It has been a somewhat lonely task that has occasionally approached becoming an obsession. Those who have borne with it in this guise, the ones with suppressed yawns and sinking eyelids who have listened to me expatiate on the subject for hours on end, deserve my profoundest thanks.

-from Acknowledgments

Professor Bulliet doesn’t know the half of it. Pity that he wasn’t seated at the campfire on any of those nights on the Darb. On the matter of camels, from KhairAllah and the drovers he would have gotten as well as he gave. For hours on end? In Dar al-Kababish you’d need weeks.

The sore and the lore

I do not love camels; I was not reared among them. I’ve never even become intimately acquainted with one. One forty five minute ride was sufficient to show me how long it takes a nonrider to get sore that way.

-The Camel and the Wheel, Richard Bulliet

KhairAllah would have advised, Usbur, Be Patient, Don’t expect in forty five minutes what took forty five days for Luwees, Daoud, Mustapha, and Nedu to learn. Sabr min Allah, Perserverance is from God, says one proverb, and another, Lucky is He who Learns from the Hardship of Others and Not his Own.

Donkeys come in l'ass't

The choice is not between the camel and the wagon…there is a more important contender: the donkey. If, as I believe the evidence shows, the cart was never a large part of Egyptian land transport, did the camel instead oust the humble ass?

-The Camel, the Wagon, and the Donkey, Roger Bagnall, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, 1985

What was happening according to Professor Bagnall in Later Roman Egypt, technological competition between the Camel and the Wheel (with the Donkey coming up strong from behind), had still not been resolved in Later Nimeiry Sudan, circa 1984, when lorry drivers began successfully to encroach on desert trade routes previously dominated by Khabeers al-Ibl, Masters of the Camels. I arrived in Nahud on the back of Gaby the Syrian’s lorry from El Obeid and I departed for Egypt on the back of Hajj Bashir Abu Jaib’s camel, and in between I rode all over town on the back of Hussein al-Hamadabi’s donkey. Forty years later I still cannot decide which gave me the smoothest ride, but I can say whose back bore me the farthest.

Gaby the Lorry Driver © David Melody

Allah's excellent Cuke

Khair, Goodness, moral or physical; anything that is good, real or ideal, actual or potential. KhairAllah, the Goodness of Allah. Khiyaar, applied as an epithet to a sing. n., you say Jamal Khiyaar, meaning, An Excellent Camel.

-Lane’s Lexicon

I always knew that the first part of KhairAllah’s name would be given special treatment by Lane, seven columns of idioms, usages, and proverbs- such as, How Good is Milk for the Diseased, or, Mayest thou Meet with Good, or, By the Life of thy Good Father. And to the cognate word Khiyaar used in the construction of epithets, Lane gives the additional meaning, Cucumber, which made for the most Excellent eating when we finally reached the Nile.

What time is the flogging?

Moore [Guy Moore, British colonial District Commissioner in Kordofan] delighted in Sudanese culture…spoke Arabic fluently…would eat squatting on his haunches from the communal bowl…renowned for his generosity but equally harsh treatment of offenders…held public floggings…respected the simplicity of Sudanese life and considered that innovation and advance were a dangerous threat to it. Because of this he forbade the people from wearing European clothes and wristwatches.

-In Search of the Forty Days Road, Michael Asher

Desert, scattered camels grazing. Voice (off camera)- What time is it? Yusuf, on his camel and looking at his wristwatch- It’s a quarter to three. Voice- What?

-Voice of the Whip

I knew for a fact that Yusuf’s watch was broken. For him, it was only an adornment like a gold front tooth. For others who asked him to tell them the time, when the sun or the moon could have told them, it was a talisman, like the leather amulet pouches they wore around their necks filled with a shaikh’s religious writing, even if perhaps gibberish, and sewn closed.

The spectre of Guy Moore, called “Meester Moore” by Kordofani mothers trying to get their children to behave- saying for instance, Meester Moore will come for you if you don’t stay away from the fire, or, Meester Moore will take you away if you keep teasing the goats- was a kind of negative talisman. That Moore would have forbidden Yusuf to wear a wristwatch, even flogged him for it, shows how much progress has been made before three o’clock.

Khairallah's daughter wants to go to school

I had travelled with tribesmen of the Zaghawa and the notorious Bedayyat…across the country of the Bani Hussayn…I had travelled with nomads of the Mahamid…and visited families of the Baggara…I had stayed with nomads of the Awlad Zayid and Awlad Janub…My time was always limited. I always had to return to my classroom…

-A Desert Dies, Part One: The Kababish, Michael Asher

I read Michael Asher’s first book, In Search of the Forty Days Road, just after I’d returned from completing what I called the Darb, with KhairAllah, Masood, Daoud, and the others. Same road, same forty days. But those forty days seemed to have lasted only forty seconds once it was over. What seemed like unlimited days, sketching the sun’s arc over my head from its rise to its fall, were gone in a green flash as soon as it had set.

If the Darb is not your place, you must always be getting back to one kind of classroom or another. KhairAllah’s second set of children, 14 year old daughter Suna and her younger brothers Tijani and Al-Fatih, want to go to school. If he lets them, I guess that means he considers the Darb not his family’s place anymore either.

Buried queens and camels

…the kings had been buried, crowned and in full regalia, along with their murdered queens, servants, all of whom seem to have been strangled or clubbed, horses, camels, and dogs…

-Blue Guide Egypt, description of 4th-6th C. CE tombs at Ballana, 15km S of Abu Simbel, just off the Way of the Forty

We did not pass close to the Ballana tombs but if we had, and I had known, I am sure that the drovers would have had questions. Horses and dogs, kings and queens? Camel throats strangled, not slit, thus rendered inedible? I would have had no answers, but just a few miles north while skirting town after dark to avoid border guards we saw the Abu Simbel police station lights blazing bright. There, the Kababish had an answer for me…Yallah binaa, God be with us, Let us ride as if we were ghosts. If the Egyptians find us and we do not pay a bribe, they said, we will be buried.